It takes a very patient person to be a mother. And if you’re my mother, well that’s an entirely different kind of patient.

First, I was an escape artist from the very beginning. No one ever figured out how I kept getting out of my crib, and as soon as I learned to walk, I learned to work the doors, which is unfortunate when you live right next to a rocky ravine. My mother had to keep me on a leash whenever we went out. But not wanting to appear uncivil, she adapted the system to be more of a phone cord that connected us by velcro wrist bands. The problem with having a mini hellion connected to your arm is that when you’re on a pay phone, said demon baby will walk around your legs until they’re wrapped up, then rip off the velcro and run. The leash came to an end when I finally snapped it as a three-year-old.

Later, at the age of five, I would be climbing in a large tree in the front yard, swinging around pretending to be Robin Hood, when I would fall and land on my arm on top of an upraised root. So I broke my arm in two places, having to be rushed to the emergency room. The same thing would happen again four years later.

After that came the burning of the living room carpet, the insurance fraud, the getting in fights, all before I even had a learner’s permit. In less than a week, my mother will be attending my graduation from college. And she’s going to cry, because she misses those days when all this happened. That’s the kind of patience I’m talking about.

So if you didn’t call your mother yesterday, beat yourself repeatedly with a weighted lash, then call her now, and come up with a convincing reason why you couldn’t do so on mother’s day. Like a car wreck or something. Happy mother’s day to all you mothers out there, and I hope your children are better behaved than I was.

Oh yeah- I wasn’t an only child. I had two sisters before me. One of them was fond of bringing in roadkill for artistic purposes. Just wait until father’s day.